For the past six months, we have been working on a new project and today is the day. We are happy to announce our newest project, called AnswerGrid, or AG in short.

What is AG?

AnswerGrid is an expert system, developed by Ziemantics, LLC. Expert systems are artificial intelligence applications. They are designed to answer questions about specific topics that they are trained on.

As its name suggests, AnswerGrid is designed to answer your questions asked in natural language, but it is not like a search engine that presents the list of webpages related to your query. Instead, it gives exact answer in natural language.

What it can do

At its current stage, it is far from being finished, because it has very limited knowledge of the world and it cannot even keep conversation going and remember what you say. To begin with, we chosed the "geography" domain and trained our system on the World FactBook databased published by CIA. This database contains various types of fact-based information about each country in the world

Since we are more focused on making the whole pipeline work as a first step, it is not at its full strenght. It can only answer limited number of questions in geography domain at this point. Such as "What is the capital of France" or "Which european country has the highest unemployment rate".

The future of AG

We are at the very begining of this. By making its debut today, we finished the first milestone. As a second milestone, in upcoming months, we will be implementing new reasoning and representation techniques to improve its capabilities. Maybe more importantly, we like to improve its conversation skills.

And as we go on, we like to model more domains in addition to geography, such as medical, financial and other fact-based scientific domains to prove that our system works on any domain.

To sum up,

At its current level, AG is only a proving ground to show that our preliminary design works. We believe even it has a very limited capacity today, as we improve its design, it will be much more powerful and useful tool for you. We hope you enjoy your time with it and make use of it even with its limited capacity.

So, please visit www.answergrid.com and ask your geography question. And if you like to learn more about AG and track its development, subscribe to its blog.

Today we'd like to announce couple of news related to the Ziemantics, LLC. First, it is unfortunate that we are temporarily suspending our RunningTalks.com project till further notice as we haven't been able to get enough interest over the last 9 months. Nevertheless we will reopen this project in the future.

On the other hand, we are embarking a new kind of mission which is somewhat different than what we accomplished so far with Ziepod, Newzie and our other projects.

Going after Information Processing

As we are living in the Information Era, we will be starting to focus more on how to process and represent information given in natural language, specifically in English. We are building a system which will be capable of converting given sentence into a machine readable representation so that we can use this representation to perform various tasks, such as context classification and labeling, question answering etc.

Developing tools for Semantic Web

And to make this more interesting, we will make our system and tools compatible with the Semantic Web standards which is the next big thing waiting to explode on the Web. Specifically, we will be converting our ZieTag project into a Semantic Web tool, which will be very interesting for sure.

Challenging Task

Even though what we described above is like a very generic description of what we are after, surely it is a very challenging task. We want to be a leading company when comes to knowledge representation and information processing and we have the right skill set to achive this goal.

Later on, we will share more about our master plan and how we are planning to use this new system with our existing projects.

Version One of our Ziepod software application is ready for download. We waited for a long time for this release. It marks the end of the first chapter in the development life of Ziepod and a start of the new one.

Our To-Do list for the "Version Two" includes very exciting features. Nevertheless, we are still looking forward to hearing your suggestions. We will be releasing more info on the future of the Ziepod project in upcoming months. In fact, in a week or so we will start a new campaign involving our Ziepod project. So tune in for that one!

We are very happy to introduce our brand new project. RunningTalks platform, or RT in short, is a free speech platform and free public service being developed by Ziemantics LLC.

RunningTalks platform enables people to share their opinions about talk subjects created by people themselves. People record and post their comments in audio on existing running talks via tools provided by the RunningTalks platform itself.

While everybody can browse running talks and listen to others' opinion, but only registered users can post their comments on existing running talks and create their own running talks to ask people's opinion about anything they can come up with.

Components of RunningTalks Platform

RunningTalks platform consists of a website www.runningtalks.com and a software application, called RTClient. In order to browse running talks, create new ones and post your comments, you can use both the website and the client since they provide same functions.

Our software application RTClient is used for accessing RunningTalks platform remotely from your desktop, so that you don't have to use any web browser. You can also use RTClient without having to sign up. It also provides some customization settings. Unfortunately, RTClient runs only on Windows machines.

Goals

We believe, RunningTalks platform has a very important role with ambitious goals to accomplish. Today social networks are the most convenient grounds for socialization and collaboration among people on the Internet and combining free speech act with the social networking concept is yet another untaken step on the Internet.

While embarking on that road, we have these goals in our minds:

Helping people share their experience

Being a platform for free speech

Providing innovative and fast user experience

Being a testbed for our future web-based applications

As we keep this platform up and running and more and more people start to make use of it, we will determine more specific goals for better and faster user experience.

Support RunningTalks Platform

We believe RunningTalks Platform will attrack many people from all countries around the world. Everybody will try to make use of the platform as much as possible by posting their comments and asking peoples' opinions. More people means more different opinions to listen to. We hope every member of this community help us spread the word so that everybody can get chance to say something about things happening around us.

To support RT, we recommend you to share your own running talks with your friends, readers and listeners and let them comment on your talks. RT is especially good platform for brainstorming, so inform as much people as possible about your talks and let them brainstorm.

Currently, RunningTalks platform is funded by donations of its community members and revenue of other projects developed at the Ziemantics Labs. We strongly recommend you to donate or purchase our products Ziepod+ or Zietag and help us afford the expenses of our servers and the bandwidth. Your donations will come back to you as new features and fast access.

All in all

Please visit www.runningtalks.com and get into the platform. We hope you enjoy your time there and express yourself freely. RT is at the BETA stage so please report any anomaly you can find thru our feedback panel. And don't hesitate to add your suggestions as well. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts about RT.

At the Ziemantics Labs, we are at the final stages of a brand new web-based project. It is a free speech platform where people share their opinion on talk subjects which are created by people themselves and it will be a free public service by Ziemantics LLC.

We are still putting the final touches and hopefully within this week (Sept 16-22) or so we will be starting its alpha test. And we are looking for volunteers for that test. Since we designed and developed the whole project from scratch (including Apache-like server itself and a specialized software application for remote access), we like to test whole platform with as much people as possible to see how it performs under heavy load.

It has a really interesting user interface based on the latest AJAX technology. If you find our projects like Ziepod and Newzie unique and appealing, we want you to consider participating in this alpha test and get a sneak preview of our next big project before everybody else.

If you like to become a tester, you just need to leave your email address thru [ this form ]. We will contact you when alpha test is ready for testing. Keep in mind that we will use your email address only for that purpose, since the project itself has its own test drivers email list that you can subscribe if you like.

Hope you want to be a tester and help us test our new project before its public debut. In return, we will give you a "present", which involves yet another new project from the Ziemantics to be released at the end of this year--"hopefully".

We also have blogs for our projects in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest development news from our projects. By subscribing to these blogs, you can get more project specific news and announcements.